Bunions Can Affect Quality of Life

Bunions -- deformities at the base of the big toe that can cause pain and disability -- are common and can really slow a person down, a new study shows.

The study, which is published in Arthritis Care & Research, found that more than one in three older adults has at least one bunion, a hard bony bump that forms at the base of the big toe.

So what can be done to prevent a bunion or keep it from getting worse?

“There are all kinds of splints and padding that you can put between your toes and things like that to try to prevent the toe from drifting over,” says Andrew J. Elliott, M.D., a foot and ankle orthopaedic surgeon at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.

However, he notes that previous studies have shown that up to 90% of people who get bunions report a family history, which may mean that some feet are just more susceptible to them than others.

“If it’s going to drift over, it’s going to do that, and it’s mostly because of an imbalance in the muscles as well as maybe some laxity in some ligaments that allow the bones to sort of drift in the direction that they’re going to, which is where it is going to rub up against the shoe,” Elliott says.

He says patients should consider surgery if they’re in steady pain, or if they’ve noticed their bunion getting rapidly worse in the last year. As a bunion gets worse, it may also cause hammertoes or crossover toes, or pain in the ball of the foot, called metatarsalgia.

“As the deformity gets bigger, it gets harder to get a good outcome with correction,” he says.

Correction typically involves surgery to cut the bone and move it over, but it doesn’t always fix things completely.

Up to 15% of people will still experience some discomfort in their feet after surgery, and up to one-third say they still can’t always wear the shoes they’d like to after the procedure, Elliott says.

And to add insult to injury, bunions can come back, even after surgery.

In the meantime, Elliott recommends reconsidering what’s on the shoe rack.

“You can make it a lot less painful by wearing appropriate footwear,” he says.